By Tom Collins
Are you a leader in any of your organizations - business, professional, social?
Yesterday, Federal Computer Week blog reported the GSA has reached an agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that "make it possible for federal agencies to use new-media tools while meeting their legal requirements."
Hello? Maybe the GSA missed it, but as of this writing 1,124,225 people had viewed the first of President Obama's weekly YouTube addresses on The White House YouTube Channel, which began just a couple of days after the inauguration in January:
Okay, so some folks at GSA probably knew about it.
But what's up with them entering into agreements now that supposedly authorize agencies to "immediately begin using new-media tools that let people post, share, and comment on videos and photos on the Web." The assumption seems to be that the terms of service agreements that nobody reads somehow violated some government rules somewhere.
I've written about the lessons business should be learning from the Web 2.0 usage by the Obama campaign and now presidency, but this story calls us to take a leadership role. The President didn't wait for a legal review, or updated guidelines, or for PR and Marketing and somebody at the EVP level to say okay.
Obama recognized what the GSA is now acknowledging:
"We need to get official information out to sites where people are already visiting and encourage them to interact with their government," said GSA Acting Administrator Paul Prouty. “The new agreements make it easier for the government to provide official information to citizens via their method of choice.”
And now the lawyers and bureaucrats are playing catchup, or "follow the leader."
Substitute "customer" or "member" for "citizen" and the same compelling logic applies to your business or other organization.
So back to the top: Are you a leader?
Seth Godin's License to stall post from earlier this week asserts that most business people involved in marketing are "stallers" who are unlikely (at best) to say "yes" to social media marketing initiatives. He argues that instead of continuing to spend millions "very expensive, complex and largely ineffective online promotions" marketers should be spending that money sponsoring relevant blogs. And he says $2,000 to $20,000 per month for a blog sponsorship would be "a bargain for both sides."
Hey, I'm all for that idea. Call us.
But if you're really going to stop being a "staller" and become a leader, isn't the lesson here that your organization should also have a blog, Twitter account, YouTube channel, and so on, of its own?
As a footnote, the GSA noted that it doesn't need to get an agreement with Twitter: "Agencies are already free to use Twitter because GSA found its standard terms of service compatible with federal use."
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